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An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Pursued
An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Pursued Author:Abraham Tucker General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1807 Original Publisher: Printed for J. Johnson by T. Bensley Description: Preface signed: The author of an essay on the principles of human action [i.e. William Hazlitt]. Subjects: Philosophy Spiritual life Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It ha... more »s no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAP. III. CAUSES OF ACTION. These I shall distinguish into the material, the formal, the ideal, the final, the instrumental, and the efficient. When you sit down to dinner, the victuals are the material cause of your eating, their being properly dressed the formal, your sight of them and knowledge of their qualities, the ideal, the gratification of your appetite the final, your knife and fork the instrumental, and the mind or body the efficient, according as you refer the action either to the will separately or to the whole man, for in the former case the body will itself be an instrument in the hands of the mind. But here I must observe, that there are persons who deny the mind to be any efficient cause at all, and as they are men of sense and learning, it would not be civil to pass them by without exchanging a word or two. 2. According to Dr. Hartley, the whole process of thought and action is carried on by vibrations in the smaller particles of the nerves and muscles; those which are excited by outward objects, and which he calls sensory vibrations, being the causes of all our sensations, and others which are mechanically excited in the brain, and propagated downwards along the muscles being the immediate springs of all our actions. Thus the sensory vibrations, like waves raised in a pond by throwing in a stone, extend to the remotest parts of the mind, and being able to get no farther recoil b...« less